A fourteen-year old street kid is out rolling drunks on New Year's Eve. Another hoodlum fights with him over his ill-gotten gains and the kid gets his eyebrow badly gashed. He retreats into the backroom of a bar where a matronly dame, probably an ex-prostitute, cares for his injuries. Later, in the alleyway behind the dive, he sees four men beat his father to death -- the man is also a penny-ante criminal. When the cops arrive, the DA asks him if he knows who killed his father, but adhering to the code of the criminal underworld, he says that he "won't fink", jumping on the side of the morgue wagon as it hauls his father's corpse away. A few days later the kid gets arrested and sent to prison. Released after a couple years, the kid (he's called Tolly Devlin) finds out that one of his father's murderers is serving time in a local penitentiary. He promptly commits another crime to get himself thrown into that jail where he old gangster is dying -- by this time, the young man, marked with the New Year's Eve scar on his brow, is 32 years old. Devlin cozies up to the prison infirmary doc and gets access to the dying murderer. He threatens the man with a scalpel and gets him to name the other three criminals involved in the murder of Devin's father. The old man pleads for forgiveness, but Devin strangles him to death. This summarizes about the first 7 minutes of Samuel Fuller's Underworld U.S.A., a garish blast of mayhem released in 1961.
Fuller wrote, produced, and directed Underworld U.S.A and it's pretty much all of a piece. The characters dash around in a film noir landscape in which every article seems to be labeled -- there are signs on windows and roadways, lettered boxes sit on the sidewalk and cars with advertising on them are everywhere. Fuller directs in all exclamation points inserting enormous close-ups into confrontation scenes (the whole screen becomes a pair of alarmed or brooding eyes) and moving the camera eccentrically -- within the first minute, Devlin who has snatched a watch and wallet off a drunk guy fallen into a heap of New Year's Eve balloons has to flee from a cop; he runs right at the audience, effortlessly leaping over obstacles as the lens glides in front of him. Everything is overlit in the clinical style of late fifties and early sixties TV shows. The only chiaroscuro in the film are shadows deployed to hide the identity of the killers whose murder of Devlin's father triggers the movie's revenge plot -- and this effect is motivated by the narrative requirement that the young man not know the identity of the thugs that he will hunt down and slaughter. In the final scenes, the protagonist lunges around in a weird landscape of brightly lit facades and sidewalks under ominous, ink-black skies -- the streets are absolutely deserted as Devlin staggers into his confrontation with mob leader and, then, succumbs to bullet wounds in the same desolate alley where the movie began. Fuller's dialogue is over-ripe with criminal jargon and bizarre ripostes: the prison doc who suspects Devlin's motives when he signs up to be a trusty in the hospital says: "You're just trying to get your hands on some joy powder." The villains that Devlin pursues and systematically kill are respectively the mob bosses responsible for Labor, Drugs, and Prostitution, the three departments of the criminal enterprise treated as well-organized divisions in the crime syndicate, the whole enterprise overseen by a fat bureaucrat who spends his time lounging around a roof-top swimming pool somewhere in south Chicago. (The crooks have their tentacles in legit business and they sponsor swimming competitions for disadvantaged neighborhood kids.) The bar run by the frazzled ex-whore is now a coffee-shop, described in derisory language as a place where intellectual types hang out, no doubt discussing Sartre while gangsters recruit criminals in the backroom: we need "more teenaged drug addicts" the portly mob boss says, ordering a henchman to put more drug dealers "in the school yards" (where school girls are also being groomed as prostitutes). The politics of the movie are so right-wing and law-and-order as to seem deranged -- although the cops are also on the take; one of them commits suicide on-screen when confronted with his misdeeds; he's drawing a cool five-thousand a week in protection money from the mob, but also motivated by the fact that the mob boss has threatened to run his daughter through a meat-grinder. When a bookkeeper threatens to testify, Gus, the dead-eyed assassin working for the mob boss, blithely hunts down the accountant's six-year old daughter and runs her down on her bike with his big Lincoln Continental.
Fuller's script is ingenious. He engineers the plot so that Devlin doesn't actually really murder anyone (except maybe the guy on death's door in the hospital). Instead, he sets the criminals against one another by planting forged documents showing that the bad guys are all about to inform on one another to the righteous federal prosecutor (the DA who tried to get Devlin to "fink" in the beginning of the movie). Listing his accomplishments, Devlin boasts: Farrar died in the hospital, Smith's getting the chair, Gunther got barbecued, and so on. Fuller fills up the movie with lurid baroque effects: the ex-whore who mothers Devlin lives in an apartment full of hideous dolls, "I guess cuz you can't have kids," Devlin remarks. A hooker who refuses to make a heroin delivery gets beat up, has her smashed cheek tended to in gruesome close-up, and, then, spends the next couple scenes traipsing about with a huge bandage on her cheek. The hooker is Devlin's love interest and she wants him to make an honest woman out of her. When he rejects her marriage proposal, the matronly ex-whore berates Devlin: "You're just a scar-faced ex-con. She's a giant. You're a midget." Devlin kisses the hooker. She says: "I die inside when you kiss me." The hooker's name is "Cuddles". This is about all you need to know about Underworld USA. It's trashy but fun. I didn't know any of the actors by name (Devlin is played by Cliff Robertson). But all of the villains are staples of B movies and sixties TV shows -- you'll know them all even if you can't identify them by name.
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